It was an easy mistake to make. It could have happened to anyone.

I was sat in my living room, and there was a storm outside. I looked down, and the middle of the carpet was rippling like a village pond in a breeze.

What would you think? Would you deduce that the wind was mysteriously passing through the apparently solid wall and going under your carpet? Or would you leap to the obvious conclusion? What if you'd had an adventurous time in the Eighties? What would you think then?

You may remember the Eighties as the age of yuppies and Duran Duran. You're wrong. Actually, it was the great age of acid. Oh, there were a few people doing acid in the Sixties, the decade it's always associated with, but it was only in the Eighties that it reached its widest demographic. I remember one occasion back then when one of the local wide boys shouted Superman at me for no apparent reason as he passed me in the street. I just assumed he was insulting me in a rather inscrutable way and walked on, and only fifty yards down the road did it dawn on me. He'd been trying to sell me Superman acid tabs. The world had changed. Soon after, acid house happened, ironically fuelled not by acid but by Ecstasy.

I remember my first trip every time I see a Salvador Dali painting, as the Metamorphosis of Narcissus was blu-tacked to the wall. You always remember your first time. Except those of you who are acid virgins. Poor saps - I've always thought of you as disabled. Mind you, I think of people as disabled if they can't do mail merge. Not being able to mend a puncture without crying, though, that's not a disability in any way. That's not how it works.

Anyway. If you've led a life like mine, the most obvious explanation for a mysteriously rippling carpet is that it's a trace echo of the states you used to put your brain in for the purposes of fun and instruction when you were a much younger man. In other words, your carpet appears to be rippling in the Noughties because of all the acid you took in the Eighties.

It was a simple and elegant way to account for the available data, and the carpet-acid paradigm survived for years. In the end, though, every paradigm has its tipping point, which in this case arrived very suddenly when a visitor asked if I knew my carpet was rippling. It's amazing how quickly a paradigm can come crashing down. So not the acid after all then, just a hairline crack in the sealant under the double glazing or something, and nothing else.

Can I give you some free advice? If this happens to you, it's vitally important that you don't then try and explain. They'll just give you The Look. You learn to recognise The Look, and to understand that the Looker has now put you in a mental box you're never coming out of. If you must tell someone, tell the Internet. You're my lovely readers, I know you'll understand.

Of course, in the context the phrase if this happens to you may seem poorly judged. But I'm not the only person that sometimes finds levels of reality hard to navigate. See, this is how I know Jesus doesn't really speak to them. I've been there, and returned to tell the tale.

There is a bright side. From 1983 to 1990 I probably took an average of one tab a week. I must have taken hundreds and hundreds of the things. And I'd always thought the carpet thing was the price I'd paid. Now it turns out I didn't pay any price at all. Result!